AAUG Reviews

by Zach Zalatel ,AAUG Member

Toast was born sometime back in the late 20th century, when you had to put wet vinyl discs into presses in order to make a 45 on your computer. With time, Toast was able to produce 8-tracks and eventually CDs, but you had to spend hours, turning prayer wheels and burning incense to make a copy of your The Journeyman Project or Meat Puppets disc. If you muttered the correct incantations and the gods looked favorably on your house, you were rewarded with a shiny CD which may or may not play in another drive. Yes, those were glorious days. My timeline may be a little off, but believe you me, not that long ago, burning CDs and other media wasn’t the walk in the park that it is today.

At its core, Toast is all about burning discs. CDs, DVDs, Blu-ray and HD-DVD discs - child’s play. You can burn just about any format of data, audio or video you can get your hands on mono, stereo, standard definition or hi-def. Drag, drop and get burning. Nothing too complicated there. Would you rather make a disc image? Take care of with ease as well. Okay, you’re saying, it burns whatever I want without trouble. I can do that without too much trouble in Leopard/Tiger/Panther/Nice Kitty now.

Beyond creating CDs, DVDs and their newer ilk, Roxio have a few other tricks up their sleeve in Toast 9. That’s right, it now burns discs with convection, making for even faster burns of your downloads of Battlestar Galactica ‘80. (more…)

by LeLinda Bourgeois ,AAUG Member

Start out with the video tutorials and this will be a very easy to use and practical program. Especially for those who are into all things audio. There is so much that you can achieve and do with this program. Ambrosia makes it easy as pie to use. The video tutorials are simple and very straightforward. I love the fact that you can record Skype calls on here and that is probably the biggest thing that I liked about it. It was a breeze to get recording quickly, but obviously there is at least a little bit of a learning curve when doing the editing. My podcast has been held up in the online interview department due to not having a good, effective, and easy to use way to record calls. Luckily Wiretap studio came to my rescue and solves this problem for me. There are so many neat things about this program, if you are into audio you will deff want this program.
One drawback for me seems to be at this point, and perhaps it is because I am new to it, but it seems that there are many different pieces to this program and they all pop up in different areas of your screen i,e two inches here two inches there etc.. I would like to see it a bit more streamlined and perhaps all in the same spot, and opened in one window; however this may add difficulty to the program. The only other thing I did not care for was that sometimes when I talked into the mic my voice did not transpose on the spot but there was a lag and it confused me and my thinking more than anything. I also would like the ability to download the video tutorials and perhaps you can, I just couldn’t. And now back to the positive….
I love the fact that you can add TWO inputs and record interviews instead of sharing a mic (more…)

by Gary Miller ,AAUG Member

Office 2008 is a big step forward for Mac Users; 4 years in the making, and now runs on Intel Macs natively, looks and runs more Mac like with it’s Leopard styled tool bars now. I am reviewing the high end version called Special Media Edition that in addition to Encourage, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, Messenger - comes a Media asset manager.

I was afraid in installing it that I’d lose my email or other stuff, but Office imported all without error, and only I was done, did I use it’s feature of deleting the older version of Office 2004. I did make a backup just in case, and I recommend you do too. The first new feature I noted was the My Day, it’s a purple colored window that shows all you have planned for today, or you click it to show future days, very nice. I’ve always liked the way Office links all calendar, address, projects, together,and in this version it’s even better.

Entourage, the email application opens and runs smoother, meaning less breakdowns like I experiences in the ‘04 version. It’s looks are improved, more Leopard like,cleaned up too. I have it set to sync with Mail so I can view my gci account or .Mac accounts. I would have liked to see the Outlook feature of complex HTML, that would allow better emails, but that must wait I guess. First looks didn’t reveal anything drastically new in the application. but Spotlight searching is there now, improved junk mail filtering, the calendar allows more color coding for events too. (more…)

by Sally Donaldson ,AAUG Member

The book is in full color, with exact illustrations of the subjects being discussed. It leads us by the hand through what ever level of movie creating we desire to achieve to turn “home video” into Pro Video.

Different techniques are required for different types of special events; such as filming and editing interviews; recording music videos; filming live stage performances, think of your kids making their stage debut in the high school drama production, or your kid’s piano recital. How do you capture and edit your kid’s sporting events, soccer, swim team, skiing competition. Not to worry, this book will teach you, step by step. Want to record the antics of your pet? Rather than have a “silent” movie of Fido romping through the snow with his favorite neighborhood dog, add appropriate music to the background to amuse your viewers.

For those of us who have “precious moments” recorded on “ancient” media: i.e. 8 mm film; Hi-8, Digital8. Etc., we no longer have to consider “I’ll never be able to view them again, without spending a small fortune having an ‘expert’ convert them to present media”, since we can learn how to convert them ourselves with our Mac.
Improvements of iMovie ’08 over previous versions are explained in understandable language.

How to select the ratio aspect most suited to your taste and/or equipment will no longer be a mystery after studying this book.

Film editing boils down to three tasks: Selecting, Trimming and Rearranging your clips. (more…)

by Gary Miller ,AAUG Member

Fellowes Saturn 95 Laminator is well designed with handle, easy access for sizes up to 9.5″ wide, so small ID or other most used sizes work well. I liked it’s handle for ease of carrying too. It’s lightweight, so anyone can take it with them.

The warm up time was only 5 minutes, so I found turning it on first, while I gathered the laminating pouches ( which can ordered through Fellowes site, or office supply stores in ID, letter and legal sizes ), got my items ready for laminating, the machine was ready. I also liked that if I got the item slightly off kilter, there was a anti jamming button to release it. Since I could choose between 3mm or 5 mm thickness settings, that gave me more freedom in choices of what I could laminate.

If one weighs the cost of buying heavy stock, which often must be run on a special printer versus laminating, and the fact that a laminated item won’t be ruined easily, then lamination usually works out better. Fellowes has HeatGuard technology, a patented system that keeps the surface temperature of the laminator cool to the touch, great safety!

I liked the Saturn 95, only issue is a bit pricey,but it can handle commercial applications of a small business… (more…)

by Carlene Brown ,AAUG Member

My PowerBook G4 has been a very dependable laptop. It has never given me any problems. However, it is four years old, has a limited hard drive capacity, 60 GB, and is slow compared to the new Apple models. After installing Leopard it started taking a long time to boot and was running slow with some programs having a hard time just opening. When I started seeing more and more spinning beach balls I knew it was time to do something.

That something was to run it through a utility program, which found some problems but was unable to correct them as I didn’t have enough contiguous space to save even a 200 MB file, and though the program could tell me what was wrong it could not fix it.

What to do? I have two utility programs that I run regularly to keep up with the maintenance of my computers but obviously neither program was doing the defragmenting that was needed.

While searching the internet for a solution I discovered Drive Genius 2 by Prosoft Engineering. Drive Genius 2 is designed for Mac OS X and is the disk utility Apple uses at their Genius Bar to defrag your drive. (Part of the ProCare program offered by Apple.)

Drive Genius 2 contains a collection of tools to maintain, manage and optimize your hard drive. Here are a few of the things Drive Genius 2 can do…. (more…)

by Guy Okada ,AAUG Member

At Macworld 2008 there were a plethora of vendors selling all manner of protection for iPod products. From designer cases to body cases there seemed to be an endless supply of iPod touch and iPhone cases. Alas, I am not yet part of the in-crowd of iPhone owners; I am a second-class citizen with my trusty iPod touch. That said, I was determined to find the best protection for my touch. I searched the vendors at Macworld with a vengeance. Most products seemed too bulky, others hid the sultry curves and cool reflective surface of my touch that is makes it so appealing. I finally decided that I would forgo an actual case for a “protective skin” or one that covers the touch with a thin, transparent, protective film.

There are several companies that sell these transparent film coverings. The one that gathered the largest crowd was Invisible Shield by Zagg mainly because they had workers applying the transparent film shield right on the showroom floor. Being the kinda guy that I am that usually roots for the underdog, I chose another vendor called BodyGuardz who sells the same products. (more…)

by Gary Miller ,AAUG Member

The new AutoPilot by Griffin Technology is an answer to a prayer. My wife recently purchased on ‘09 Matrix with a nice audio system that includes an outlet for plugging her iPod Classic directly into the audio system, so no more issues in using an FM connecting device. The salesman said she could control and see the playlists on the radio, but he was wrong, but Griffin’s AutoPilot gives direct access to control the iPod, and Griffin has a cable that plugs perfectly into the iPod, and the other end into the car. The 2nd part plugs into the cigarette lighter ( shows whether it’s charging or is charged by colors on it ), and the other end into the bottom of the iPod. It also has an easy to use button to play, fast forward, reverse, stop or pause, it says it works through the dash too.

All that’s necessary to use it, is to turn on the car stereo, turn it to AUX, and music is playing. I turned up the volume on the iPod and that helped too, so the car system wasn’t struggling to give the disco music good sound. Griffin says if your car doesn’t have an AUX input, then you can use their DirectDeck cassette adapter that they sell separately. (more…)

by Dave Enders ,AAUG Member

MacJournal 5 is a journalling application revamped for Leopard that allows any kind of content from text, PDF, Quicktime movies and images. It allows for multiple journals which can have the option to be password protected and AES 256 bit encrypted. This should be plenty to keep prying eyes from your journals if desired.

A nice feature of MacJournal is that you can import text, pdf files , images , audio and movies into your journal entries. I was able to paste, drag and drop and use the File->Import to bring these items into MacJournal. I would like to see a media browser added instead of doing the File-Import method. It would make it more consistent with Apple and third party applications while making it easier to use. Images that are placed in journal entries can be sized by percentage or by dragging the corner of the image. I found that pdf’s can also be scaled once brought into MacJournal.

MacJournal offers all the benefits of rich text editing such as bold , underline,italics etc. I did like was the Paste and Match Style feature which forces the text you are pasting to take the attributes of the paragraph that it is being inserting into. The Edit menu offered the following options for journal entries.

- Date and Time
- Checkbox
- Link (similar to the html tag)
- iTunes Artist and Song (currently playing)
- Safari Address (current Safari website) (more…)

by Theresa Geiger ,AAUG Member

iMac for Dummies 5th edition is well laid out as most Dummie books are. Chambers infuses humor into his writing to keep your interest up. At times you need to chuckle as he hits the nail on the head with his humorous explanation. The books starts with unpacking your computer using simple functions to get you familiar with the machine. It tells you about the great Apple help system to answer your questions. It moves on to get you familiar with Leopard and transferring data if need be.

Getting familiar with Finder is next along with Safari so you can surf the net is next. Most people have heard about iTunes and the book does a good job of getting you started. I always seem to learn something new each time I reread a chapter. I forgot about the custom equalizer in itunes and played with it which resulted in a better sound. Love the shortcuts for ITunes he presents.

Most people have a digital camera so the next important function of a computer especially a Mac is iPhoto. The new updated iPhoto makes it real easy to organize your photos by date with the new Events system of ordering your pictures by date. From there you can reorganize your photos into albums. The instructions in some cases were not complete and I had to revert to the help menu for iPhoto. One such time is when I wanted to start a new Event and wanted to transfer pictures from other events, I had taken pictures on different days and wanted to group them together. The help menu came to the rescue. (more…)